Predicting extinction risk of 328,565 species of flowering plants using AI

Last updated: 5 Mar, 2024

In a new study, published today in New Phytologist, scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew have, for the first time, predicted the extinction risk of all 328,565 known species of flowering plants.

Extinction risk predictions for all 328,565 flowering plant species are now freely available via Kew’s Plants of the World Online portal.

Scientists hope it will accelerate conservation where most needed and allow people to protect local biodiversity.

Angraecum sesquipedale (Darwin's orchid) – Ines Stuart Davidson © RBG Kew

'We hope that these predictions can be used for people to apply to their own local biodiversity to find out if they’ve got a threatened species in their house, garden or local park that needs protecting,' said co-author Dr Steven Bachman.

'At a larger scale, our findings can be used by scientists to prioritise and accelerate extinction assessments for the plants we’ve identified as probably threatened but haven’t been officially assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List yet.'

The scientists used a Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) model trained on a dataset of more than 53,000 plants already assessed on the IUCN Red List, to determine the likely status of the remaining 275,004 unassessed species.

An earlier publication showed that 45% of all flowering plants are threatened with extinction. Today's publication enables access to the data on which this headline was based, the full set of predictions for individual species. The researchers' ambition is that these predictions have immediate scientific value in making plant conservation more accessible and engaging to a wider audience so that biodiversity can be urgently protected.

Endangered Clianthus puniceus - Ines Stuart Davidson © RBG Kew

Extinct in the Wild Clianthus puniceus - Ines Stuart Davidson © RBG Kew

'Being assessed, particularly as Endangered or Critically Endangered, literally changes the fate of a plant, as once its extinction risk is known, it can be prioritised for conservation,' said co-author Dr Eimear Nic Lughadha. 'In the absence of IUCN Red List assessments for all plant species, our predictions will provide a really useful indication as to which species we consider most likely to be threatened with extinction and, for the first time, our level of confidence in each species’ prediction.

This is an edited version of a Kew Science press release.